Thursday, February 18, 2021

To Each Its Own Adjectives

Sometimes a good dose of satire is all that we need to see the rank absurdity of our pieties. If the minions who work at Goldman Sachs have a right to walk around making fools of themselves by wearing tags announcing their preferred pronouns-- dese, dose, dem and duh-- why not allow people to have their very own preferred adjectives.

So posits the satiric site The Babylon Bee (via Maggie’s Farm):

Ted Becker never worried much about his pronouns, but he has still found the language of others to be hurtful and demeaning. That’s because people use adjectives to describe him that are not at all descriptions he identifies with. 

So Becker now has made public his list of “preferred adjectives” he’d like people to use when referring to him.“ Here are the adjectives I identify with,” Becker put on social media. “‘Cool, witty, handsome, innovative, fun.’ Please use one of these adjectives when describing me.”

“It distresses me when people use adjectives I don’t identify as,” Becker later explained. “Like ‘creepy,’ ‘weird,’ or ‘off-putting.’ That’s basically denying my existence and trying to genocide me.” Many would call that statement ‘nutty,’ but that is not from Becker’s list of approved adjectives.

As Jonathan Swift might have said, it’s a modest proposal.


2 comments:

JPL17 said...

Perfect, Stuart, thanks for sharing.

And for everyone else who posts here, my comments on this blog identify with the adjectives, "sharp", "incisive", and "pithy". Their feelings are hurt terribly when they are described by adjectives with which they don't identify, such as "lame", "obscure", "delusional", etc.

Sam L. said...

Now, that's FUNNY! Too bad there's a humor drought going on. Me, I'd say "get off that worm you rode in on."